


Heartlines

by callunavulgari



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Depression, M/M, Mentioned Stiles Stilinski/Malia Tate, Minor Braeden/Derek Hale, Past Derek Hale/Paige, Past Kate Argent/Derek Hale, Self-Acceptance, Self-Harm, Self-Hatred, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Suicidal Thoughts, Underage Sex, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-08
Updated: 2015-01-25
Packaged: 2018-03-06 15:34:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3139541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callunavulgari/pseuds/callunavulgari
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Here’s how it happens. One day, Derek wakes up with an arm covered in scars and a single black tally. At the end of the day, when he’s driving home still reeking of chlorine, he has a second one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So, awhile ago I saw [this post](http://grokwrites.tumblr.com/post/98426252509/tuckedshirts-pretendersrpa) on tumblr and went, shit, what if there were tally marks for more familial love as well? And then I went, fuck, _Derek Hale_. Which of course promptly devolved into me combining 'Imagine someone with no tally marks starting to like someone with all tally marks scarred ' with 'imagine someone with a single scarred mark that refuses to love again gets a new mark and it’s black' and outlining the entire thing in my tumblr tags like a crazy person.
> 
> So yeah. This is the first of two parts, but not to worry, this time the second part is already written so I don't have people fretting halfway through a WIP because I got hella blocked. Initially it was supposed to be one part, but I got caught up to canon events and realized that Stiles wanted to write the next part. So here we are! I may publish the next bit tomorrow or wait a week, it all depends on RL and how many people nag me for a legit resolution.

Derek Hale is born with two black marks already slashed across his wrist. Two tiny marks, slightly larger than a drop of ink.  
  
His mom liked to tell that story — that they weren’t like most parents, who watched the tiny notches bloom to life beneath their eyes — that he was _special_ , like Laura, because he had those marks since his parents found out that they were going to have another baby. She smiled as she told it, said that even before he took his first breath, Derek could feel his packs love, and loved them in return.  
  
She also liked to tell the story of how the little smears of ink grew, how they watched more and more tallies come into being every time they showed him off to an aunt, an uncle, or one of the wayward wolves they’d adopted into their pack.  
  
At age five, he had more tallies than most adults could ever hope to have.  
  
His first day of school, a boy in his class had made fun of him — said he was a freak — because no one had that many tally marks. That he must have drawn himself, because there was no way he had that many people who loved him.  
  
“It comes with being part of a pack,” his mother had told him later that day, setting her own wrist alongside his. The underside of her wrist was paler than most of her, her own tallies more vibrant than a tattoo could ever hope to be, dotting her arm clear down to the bend of her elbow. She smiled and kissed the top of his head. “It doesn’t make you weird, it just means that you’re so very, very loved.”  
  
.  
  
He gets his first red mark in sixth grade.  
  
Daniel’s family is from Argentina and he’s the only kid in their class who speaks Spanish too. He has dark, floppy hair and a smile that a lot of the kids make fun of him for, because it looks more like a grimace than anything.  
  
The first time that Derek yells at the other kids for bullying him, Daniel glares at him and spits the word ‘hero’ at him like it’s something dirty.  
  
Daniel hates Derek. He pretends like he can’t hear him whenever he tries to apologize and walks away whenever Derek tries to approach him after school. It’s not until halfway through the year that Derek breaks and shouts back, voice pitched high with helpless frustration.  
  
He doesn’t know who leaps at who first, but later, after he’s sitting in the principal's office with a stubbornly maintained bruise on his jaw that Daniel looks at him, eyes narrowed, and explains in a quiet voice.  
  
“Most people don’t mean it when they stick up for me,” he says carefully, in Spanish, because one of the office ladies is giving them the stink eye as she phones their mothers. “It’s just a way for them to feel better about themselves.”  
  
Derek nods. “I’m sorry. I didn’t understand.”  
  
Daniel flashes him a small smile, the one that looks like a grimace, and says, “It’s okay.”  
  
Derek wakes up the next day with a red ink blot at the tail end of all the black ones, standing out like a sore thumb. He wears long sleeves to school even though it’s a warm spring day outside. It takes Laura fourteen minutes before she finds it and starts crowing down the hallway to mom.  
  
The mark fades away four months later, when Derek stops feeling bubbly every time he looks at Daniel and starts feeling the way he does about Laura or any of the rest of his family. Daniel’s still his friend, but whatever made it love goes away with time.  
  
.  
  
The second time Derek gets a red mark, it’s the day after Paige yells at him outside the music room. Slowly, over the next few months, the mark begins to solidify — darkening to black as their relationship progresses.  
  
It feels good, to see Paige’s tally mark next to his pack’s. It feels so right, seeing her there, that it doesn’t even occur to him that Peter’s idea of making her pack might be a bad one.  
  
“I loved you,” Paige whispers tremulously into his collarbone, her thumb slowly stroking her mark on Derek’s wrist. And then, minutes later— “ _Please_.”  
  
He watches the black peel from his skin when she dies, gasps at the sheer pain of it, throat working with the effort not to howl as the raw, red skin beneath scars over. He stares at the black marks still on Paige’s wrist until Peter comes.  
  
Paige only had three marks. Her parents and Derek. He stares at it, cradling her close to him like he can warm her lukewarm body with his own, and wonders why she gets to keep hers in death when he doesn’t get that luxury.  
  
.  
  
A year later, he meets a beautiful woman at the supermarket. His first meeting with her is brief enough — she’s just an exceptionally pretty face that talks with him as he picks up fresh vegetables for his aunt. But then a week later, she’s standing at the front of his classroom, her eyes on him as she tells the class that she’s going to be their substitute for the foreseeable future.  
  
Her name is Kate.  
  
.  
  
The red mark is slow to bloom this time.  
  
Derek has sex with her in a janitor’s closet three months into her stay at the high school, but even while he’s inside her, there’s nothing next to Paige’s scar. She’s a gaping hole in his chest, tangible proof of his own stupidity, and this time, Derek's not so quick to love.  
  
Kate has no tally marks. He probably isn’t supposed to see, but their fifth time together her bracelet gets stuck in the zipper of his pants, revealing the blank skin beneath.  
  
He doesn’t say anything about it, just helps her fasten it back up, and goes back to getting his hand up her skirt.  
  
It bothers him though, nags at him each night as he watches his own red mark slowly form, darkening each night. It starts the palest of pinks, getting redder and redder each day.  
  
The night before the lunar eclipse, he tells her about them.  
  
Derek’s been careful, so very careful, but he doesn’t want what happened with Paige to happen all over again. He wants to tell her himself. So he does. He tells her about mountain ash and wolfsbane in case she ever needs to protect herself. He tells her about his pack, about his mother and sisters, father and uncles. He tells her everything.  
  
He even tells her about the lunar eclipse and how even his extended relatives are coming in from out of town, because they’re safer in numbers even without their powers, right?  
  
The next morning, he and Laura leave the house early, while the moon is still up, because she’s got a test to make up and Derek wants to see if Kate’s already at the school.  
  
Thirty minutes after they get there, Laura starts screaming.  
  
They watch their life crumble to ash, as each and every family member becomes a scar, bodies trembling as they run, because it _hurts_ , but maybe if they’re fast enough, they’ll save someone. _Anyone_.  
  
Halfway through the preserve, Laura collapses, clutching her arm and wailing as the last tally mark flakes off her skin.  
  
When she looks back at him, she has their mother’s eyes.  
  
.  
  
They’re going to go to New York.  
  
Laura decided.  
  
They make it to Colorado, Laura silent, her steely eyes on the road the entire time, before Derek remembers to check his phone in case Kate tried to get a hold of him. She deserves to know from him at least, that he’s halfway across the country because his entire family died, and that they can’t be together right now.  
  
He finds a voicemail waiting for him, and waits until he’s secluded himself in a gas station bathroom before he checks it.  
  
Despite everything, her voice brings a small smile to his face. He has three tally marks left now. Laura’s, of course; a black one that he’s assuming is a distant relative that his mom showed him off to that made it out of the fire intact; and Kate’s.  
  
Three, out of almost twenty.  
  
He has to listen to the message three times before he can make sense of her words, her sickly sweet voice clogging his ear like wax as she gloats.  
  
“Poor little puppy,” she coos just before the message cuts out. “Run and hide, puppy. I’m sure you remember that I like playing games.”  
  
The next few days are a haze of shock and self-loathing. Laura starts giving him concerned looks and he can’t take it, can’t take her pity when she doesn’t understand.  
  
He should have died with the family he killed. He should have; he wants to. He has extended fantasies of dying horribly, painfully. He kills himself in a hotel bathroom, jumps out of the car going around a mountain curve, finds the nearest hunters and shows them his eyes. He gets lost in it, in the idea of it, but every time he thinks that he should just do it he thinks of Laura — of what she’d do without him, what would happen if Kate found her and Derek wasn’t there to stop her.  
  
He doesn’t do it. He doesn’t.  
  
What he does do is wait until she’s out of their hotel room and hide himself in the bathroom.  
  
He takes his claws to his wrist over and over, sets them against Kate’s red mark and carves. He does it again and again, until the healing starts slowing as he loses more and more blood.  
  
It takes a lot to scar a werewolf, Peter had told him once. You have to straddle that line between life and death and keep going, holding the idea in your mind that you’re going to scar, that _you will not heal_.  
  
It takes hours.  
  
Laura finds him like that, breaking the bathroom door down when she smells his blood, her eyes glowing like embers. She takes one look at his wrist, at the raw purple scar that’s nothing like the faded streaks that are the rest of their family, and he can see the moment she makes the connection. The horrified realization that Derek was the reason their family burned alive.  
  
She makes him tell her everything and after, she stares at him blankly, like she has no idea who he is anymore.  
  
“I’m sorry,” he tells her when they’re getting into the camaro. It’s three o’clock in the morning and they weren’t supposed to check out until eleven the next day, but Laura had said she wouldn’t be able to sleep with the smell of his blood so thick in the air.  
  
“It’s not your fault,” she says quietly, eyes still on the road. There are tear tracks on her face, dried and fresh.  
  
Her voice is steady.  
  
Her heartbeat isn’t.  
  
.  
  
The years pass. Some things get better. Others don’t.  
  
.  
  
Laura doesn’t tell him that she’s going to Beacon Hills. She only texts him once, when she’s already there, telling him where she is and that something’s wrong.  
  
He’s already on a plane to California when the pain hits.  
  
Derek watches with blurred eyes as her mark peels from his skin, scabbing and scarring faster than a blink, and it takes everything for him to stop himself from howling. The woman sitting next to him must notice him twitch or something, because she glances over, idly tucking a strand of black hair behind her ear as she does. He can tell the moment her eyes land on his wrist, because she gasps, her entire body jerking in the seat. The man on her other side grunts, but doesn’t wake.  
  
Her hand lands on his and he chances a look at her, sees the tears welling up in her dark eyes, her mascara already darkening as her lashes absorb the wetness.  
  
“Oh my god,” she gasps, hand tightening around his, and that’s it. No more words, just her hand on his, her tears drowning out the rest of the smells in the cabin. She smells like hair dye and an overabundance of makeup, metal from her piercings, and the subtle traces of every stranger she’d brushed up against in the airport.  
  
He wonders who she’s lost, that she can sit next to him and offer comfort without rushing into words. That she can look at his wrist with it’s army of scars and not flinch away like his loss is contagious.  
  
She holds his hand for the rest of the flight and when they reach their destination, she squeezes once, and lets go.  
  
Derek’s grateful. She couldn’t have smelled less like pack, and that’s exactly what he’d needed.  
  
He rents a car from the airport and drives the two-hour journey to Beacon Hills in forty-five minutes.  
  
Beacon Hills smells the same — like tree sap and humans and _pack_.  
  
He steels himself, drops the rental car off where he was instructed, and sets out to find his sister’s body.  
  
.  
  
When Derek first sees his uncle again, standing all on his own, aware and alert, he thinks that he’s finally found the owner of that one black streak still splashed across his wrist. Even as he crawls across broken glass, half paying attention to the sound of Stiles scrambling for safety he thinks, this is it. This is his uncle, and even if Derek wasn’t aware of there still being someone alive in there to love, the tally knew. Derek’s skin knew that a member of his pack was left, even if his mind had buried Peter the day that they realized he wasn’t going to come out of his coma.  
  
It’s hard to see past that, to see past family, when Peter tells him that he didn’t mean to kill Laura — that this was about revenge — and didn’t their family deserve that _justice_?  
  
Only, when he finally realizes that his uncle is well and truly gone, he’s looking. He swipes his claws across Peter’s throat and feels the power pass to him, but Derek’s _looking_ , eyes gone red with the power of an alpha glued to that streak of black.  
  
It doesn’t scar. It doesn’t vanish. It’s still there, mocking him, and for the dozenth time, he wonders what pack member made it out of the fire — who escaped Kate Argent’s wrath.  
  
.  
  
(He’s still wondering a year later, when he walks into a bank vault and finds Cora waiting for him.)  
  
.  
  
Derek made a pact with himself, on the day that he found Laura, that even if he somehow managed to latch onto a pack and live out the rest of his life, he would never allow himself the pleasure of loving them. Not the way he loved the pack he murdered.  
  
He bites Jackson, Isaac, Erica, and Boyd, and throughout it all, his wrist stays blank. Just his scars. He cares for them the way he thinks he should and feels horribly justified when Erica and Boyd leave him.  
  
This is what it means, why he did it, so that when they leave him he won’t feel it.  
  
“You have a heart of stone, Derek Hale,” Erica tells him, sounding tired and so very sad the day that her and Boyd leave. Her chin is held high, eyes gleaming and proud, but there are bags beneath them, bruising that the makeup can’t even hope to hide. “You won’t ever be able to keep anyone if you don’t let them in.”  
  
Derek watches her go and tugs his shirtsleeves down, as far down his wrists as they’ll go.  
  
.  
  
Here’s how it happens.  
  
One day, Derek wakes up with an arm covered in scars and a single black tally.  
  
At the end of the day, when he’s driving home still reeking of chlorine, he has a second one. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You love with your whole heart,” his mom had told him once, during those horrible months after she got sick. “You may not love easily, but the people you do love, you love fiercely and you never let them go. That’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
> 
> He doesn’t mind it so much, being Stiles Stilinski, with his three tally marks and his scar. It just means that whenever he does get another tally, they’ll be someone worth waiting for.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long. I ended up rewriting this part about six times because I wasn't happy with the original. Of course, it kind of spiraled out of control and I kept hating each rewrite more and more. I'm still not happy with this one, but if I don't post it I'll never be able to get back to my Bioshock Infinite AU, and that would be the real travesty. So hope you enjoy, even if it's not what I'd hoped.

Przemysław Stilinski is born with a blank wrist. It's not uncommon. Sometimes it takes months for a child’s tallies to show up. There have been countless studies on the matter over the years, terabytes of data as to why some children are born with the marks and some aren’t.   
  
Some have theorized that it has to do with the child’s capacity to love — that even as an infant, the tally marks prove which children will grow up to be more distrusting of strangers and which ones will grow up with an overflowing heart. Others think it has to do with the parents themselves, that the children can sense it when their parents don’t love them as much as they should. There are dozens and dozens of theories, but the fact of the matter is that there is no answer. For over a century people have been doing studies on heartlines and they’ve yet to find anything conclusive.

  
It takes a week for Przemysław to develop his first mark and two days more to develop his second.  
  
.  
  
Stiles meets Heather in Montessori school. They spark a friendship that spans years when their mothers realize they live right down the street from each other and set up play dates every other day. It’s a glorious friendship that somehow survives mud fights and horrible bath-related injuries.  
  
When Stiles is six, he gets the faintest pink mark on his wrist. It’s there for twenty-seven hours before it fades.  
  
His mother frets about it, wrinkling her nose when Stiles just shrugs and bounces back out the door on Heather’s heels.  
  
“I can’t decide if this means he’s going to be quick to fall in love or quick to fall out of it,” she complains, leaning against her husband’s shoulder. Mr. Stilinski hums and turns his newspaper.  
  
“Might be both,” he tells her agreeably, eyes flicking to hers from under his glasses. “Might be neither. He’s six. And honey? I can guarantee you that dwelling on it won’t help anyone. It’ll only drive us crazy.”  
  
“I suppose you’re right,” she sighs, rolling her eyes discreetly behind his back. “When did you get so wise anyway?”  
  
He snorts at her. “Probably around the time I met your babcia. You get wise around that woman or you melt into a puddle of goop.”  
  
They laugh, and when Stiles gets home with the last of the pink gone from his wrist, neither of his parents say a thing.  
  
.  
  
Stiles first meets Scott in kindergarten, but he doesn’t truly know the boy who will grow up to be his best friend until he’s in second grade.   
  
See, the day that Stiles first met Scott, he peed on his sandcastle. Being five years old, Scott took it very personally. To Stiles, that meant war.  
  
For three years, Scott McCall was his nemesis. They threw mud pies in each others faces, sabotaged class projects, tackled each other with all the might in their spindly little bodies during recess, and in Stiles’ case, took to stealing the cookie from Scott’s lunchbox because his seat was right next to the cubbies, and really, why waste that opportunity?  
  
Then one cold December afternoon, Scott walked into the sheriff’s station with his mom at his side.  
  
Melissa McCall had her chin held high, a gleam of challenge in her dark eyes, as if daring anyone to ask about the bruise smeared down her jaw. Carefully, she’d installed Scott in the chair furthest from the window in the lobby, and marched straight into Stiles’ dad’s office.  
  
He remembers thinking that it was weird, for Scott to be so quiet. Usually by now he’d be glaring at Stiles, maybe even twisting up his nose and calling him names, but not this time. This time Scott is completely silent, staring at the wall with blank eyes. He’s shaking, hands clenching and unclenching in the fabric of his pants.  
  
“Hey,” Stiles calls, tossing his crayon in Scott’s direction. It hits his shoe — the light up Spiderman ones that Stiles had been jealous over for _months_ until he got a pair of Batman light ups for Christmas — and bounces off, rolling under Tara’s desk, where the night shift will undoubtedly find it later. “Poophead.”  
  
Scott twitches, turning to stare at Stiles with blank eyes and Stiles…  
  
Stiles can be mean sometimes. He can be mean a lot of times, because most kids his age are dumb and if they’re going to be mean to him anyways, why shouldn’t he be mean to them first? But Scott doesn’t look very mean right now. He looks scared and tired, and now that Stiles is looking, there’s the mottled green of a healing bruise coloring his cheekbone.  
  
Stiles isn’t very nice at the best of times, but right now, Scott looks like he could use someone nice in his life.  
  
Scott is still looking at him, blinking slowly as he recognizes Stiles, shoulders drawing up around his ears like he’s expecting a blow, so Stiles smiles and says, “Want a cookie?”  
  
Four months later, there’s a new black tally on his wrist, right next to his father and mother’s.  
  
.  
  
Lydia’s tally shows up about halfway through third grade, not even a full year after Stiles gets Scott’s.  
  
Unlike Scott’s, Lydia Martin’s tally is a streak of red against the pallor of his wrist.  
  
Stiles looks at it with narrowed eyes, and at recess, marches up to her on the playground and hisses, “I accept your challenge.”  
  
Looking back, that’s probably why it takes a good nine years for her tally to darken to black.   
  
.  
  
Stiles is ten when his mom dies.  
  
Watching her scar hurts worse than the actual scarring itself, which feels like touching his skin to the oven and leaving it there.  
  
He’s been watching her die for a year, her mind slowly killing the rest of her body, but it still didn’t prepare him for the way it feels to hold her hand as she slips away from him, wrist facing him, because he didn’t want to miss her last moments.  
  
His wrist scars and all around him the nurses are shouting things, like they hadn’t really been ready for this, even though they’ve been preparing for months.  
  
His mother’s eyes are closed, her wrist tilted towards his, the line of six black tallies looking like a monster’s stitched smile.   
  
Stiles watches her until the nurses finally pull him away.  
  
.  
  
He doesn’t get any more tally marks after his mom.   
  
Some nights, Stiles lies in bed and thinks about what she’d have to say about that. She’d want him to be happy, he knows, and it’s not like he’s going out of his way to avoid loving people, but… there’s no drive. Stiles isn’t like most kids his age, who check their wrists hourly to see if their crush has finally reciprocated.   
  
Stiles isn’t particularly happy, not with his dad smelling like whiskey whenever he has more than an hour or so between shifts. He spends a lot of time in the cemetery when he’s not with Scott, back pressed up against his mother’s headstone as he reads to her from all her old favorites. He leaves in time to make dinner, and sometimes his dad even comes home to eat it.  
  
He isn’t happy, and that’s not fair, is it? His mother would want him to be happy. She’d want him smiling and laughing, because she’d always loved his laugh.  
  
Stiles has Scott though. He still has his dad. And there’s always the looming promise of Lydia Martin eventually realizing that he’s her soul mate.  
  
He isn’t happy, he thinks. But he’s not exactly unhappy either.  
  
“You love with your whole heart,” his mom had told him once, during those horrible months after she got sick. “You may not love easily, but the people you do love, you love fiercely and you never let them go. That’s nothing to be ashamed of.”  
  
He doesn’t mind it so much, being Stiles Stilinski, with his three tally marks and his scar. It just means that whenever he does get another tally, they’ll be someone worth waiting for.  
  
.  
  
Here’s how it happens for Stiles.  
  
In his sophomore year of high school, his best friend gets bitten by a werewolf. Over the course of several months, Stiles discovers several dozen things. Some of them are broad and all-encompassing, like the supernatural world being a reality. Others are smaller, but no less important for it.  
  
He looks someone he hates in the face for the first time and realizes that he doesn’t _actually_ want them to die. He experiences first hand that constant vigilance isn’t half as fun as good ole J.K. made it sound. He learns what it’s like to smell burning flesh and know you’re the cause of it. He watches someone die and doesn’t feel any remorse. He learns that Jackson Whittemore really is a great big bag of dicks at heart.  
  
These are the things that Stiles learns — about the world, about himself, about his best friend.  
  
But the most important thing he learns is probably the smallest. And it’s as simple as a streak of black forming on his wrist when he looks into Derek Hale’s eyes in a high school parking lot. He stares at it that night, tracing the new line right next to Lydia’s red one, and feels his heart thumping away in his chest.  
  
He thinks of Derek Hale’s army of scars and how even now, Derek’s probably flipping his shit somewhere.  
  
Stiles always wears long sleeves. Contrary to popular belief, he doesn't wear them because of his scar. He wears them because layering is comfy and awesome. He’s thankful for that habit now though, when he goes to school the next day and no one’s the wiser to the latest addition to his wrist.  
  
The next time Stiles sees Derek, he’s wearing a long-sleeved henley and tugging fitfully at the sleeves.  
  
They don’t talk about it.  
  
.  
  
The first time he actually sees his own mark on Derek’s skin, his heart stutters. There’s no notable change to his voice. He doesn’t stop teasing Derek about his ridiculous wall punching plans, doesn’t shy away when he grips Derek’s wrist and tugs his fist up against the palm of his own hand.  
  
There’s just that simple knowledge that he’s touching his own heartline on someone else’s skin.   
  
His heart stutters and Derek doesn’t bat an eye, just drives his fist into Stiles’ palm as hard as he can.   
  
It isn’t acknowledged. They still don’t talk about it. The only thing that marks the moment is that one silly stutter of his heart.  
  
.  
  
Later, he wonders if just maybe Derek’s heart had stuttered too.  
  
.  
  
Another stutter, another flicker of a heartbeat, this time in a hospital. Derek’s hand around his wrist this time, eyes wide and almost wondering, as if he hadn’t expected Stiles to be there.  
  
A touch. A stutter. A moment in time.  
  
He helps Derek to his feet.  
  
They let the moment pass them by.  
  
.  
  
(Derek doesn’t get the faintest hint of a pink tally when he’s with Jennifer. Stiles doesn’t know this, but he does wonder.)  
  
.  
  
The nogitsune takes his body. It takes his body and touches his marks and plots to kill everyone Stiles cares about.  
  
“And who is this one, I wonder,” it whispers, drawing a careful thumb over Derek’s mark.   
  
Stiles thrashes and rails against it, but it just laughs at him, tugging the cuff of his shirt back over Stiles’ wrist.   
  
“No matter,” it tells him with a shrug. “I’ll find out when it scars.”  
  
.  
  
Malia wears a thick bracelet over her scars. She doesn’t talk about it and she doesn’t ask him pressing questions about the marks on his arm.   
  
Stiles is glad of it.   
  
Scott had asked once. His dad had asked more than once. Stiles hadn’t given either of them a serious answer.  
  
He throws himself into Malia and knows that they’ll never be enough for each other. He loves her as much as he loved Allison or Erica, as much as he loves Kira. They’re pack. Friends. None of them he’s loved enough to leave a mark.  
  
.  
  
Sometimes Stiles wonders why Derek’s different. They weren’t friends when it happened. They weren’t even allies. But there was something there between them, a faint thread of _something_ so monumental that their hearts felt the need to write it into their very skins.  
  
Everyone that Derek ever loved died horrible deaths. It makes sense, why he’d never want to love again.  
  
But he did, and Stiles did, and now they’re here, barely friends and not talking about it.  
  
.  
  
And then…  
  
Then Mexico happens.  
  
.  
  
Derek looks him in the eye and tells Stiles to go, to leave Derek to die in someone else’s arms. Stiles, who has never once left Derek to death, who has never once thought to leave Derek behind, even before the marks. He tells him to go, blood on his lips, and Stiles’ heart stutters. It clenches and leaves his lungs somewhere in the vicinity of his throat and Stiles…   
  
Stiles goes.   
  
The church is dank and dark. He is terrified and focused on the task at hand. There’s Scott, who isn’t dead, because Stiles hasn’t felt the burn yet.   
  
Stiles spends the entire fight wondering how he’s going to function when Derek’s mark burns itself from his skin.  
  
.  
  
Three days later, Stiles finds Derek at the loft.  
  
It’s quiet, in the aftermath of everything. Birds sing. Children laugh. Cars go trundling by outside.  
  
The line of Derek’s back is tense. He’s playing with the cuff of his shirt.  
  
“Heard Braeden left town,” Stiles says, shifting in the doorway.  
  
Derek shrugs. “She wasn’t here to stay. We knew that.”  
  
“You could have gone with her.”  
  
Derek looks up, tearing his gaze away from the window, and turns toward Stiles. There’s a wry curve to his lips, something that’s almost a smile. “No,” he says softly. “I really couldn’t have.”  
  
Stiles sighs, explosively, and crosses the room to drop down onto the bed next to Derek. They sit in silence for several moments and every breath they take sounds like the roar of a gun.   
  
“I don’t want you to be another scar,” Stiles admits quietly.   
  
Derek just looks at him, eyes doing something complex that Stiles has never seen before. He snorts, yanking up the sleeve of his shirt to show Stiles the arm that he’s seen a dozen times over. Derek gestures at the scarred marks and says, “I don’t want you to be one either.”  
  
Stiles holds his breath.   
  
In the end, it’s as easy as a heartbeat.   
  
Easy as a stutter. A moment. A touch.  
  
He rolls his eyes and bumps their shoulders together. “I’ve had your mark on me since the _kanima_ , dude. Pretty sure that if your love hasn’t killed me yet, it’s probably not going to.”  
  
“That’s not how it works,” Derek protests, wrinkling his nose.   
  
“Sure it is. And besides,” he leans in, cupping a hand around his mouth like he’s telling Derek a secret. “I’d rather have you, all things considered. Clearly the feelings aren’t planning on going away anytime soon, and I—”  
  
His heart stutters again. His cheeks flare red, because this time, Derek doesn’t even pretend that he doesn’t hear it, arching one dark eyebrow.   
  
_I want to be the one with you, the next time it all goes to shit. I want to show you that it’s safe to let someone in. I want to have the chance to love you._  
  
Stiles doesn’t say any of that. Instead, he clears his throat and finishes, rather stupidly, “I’d just rather have you.”  
  
Derek blinks at him, eyes wide and clear. “Okay.”  
  
“Okay?”  
  
Slowly, Derek smiles. “Okay.”  
  
.  
  
(The first time they kiss, they’re in eight feet of water. Derek refuses to see the humor, but Stiles thinks that it’s kind of perfect.)


End file.
